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Well here we are again for the start of another week and I hope you guys are all enjoying your long weekend. Of course not many independent affiliate marketers in our industry get to take the day off but this long weekend is always a beacon to us as we trudge through a long, hot northern summer.

Money
Historically it's the day that marks the change in many small webmasters' fortunes because college is back, winter is coming and people tend to spend more time online in the coming months and that puts more money in our pockets. Of course it might not work quite that way this year thanks to the global financial crisis but when we look at the figures for some of our clients things definitely seem to be improving.

Even in the United States, where the effects of the crisis seemed to be felt by more people, economists and other experts are suggesting that we're beginning to see an improvement in the situation. People are still losing their jobs but the rate at which jobs are disappearing is dropping and things really may be about to turn around.

But don't rush to spend the money that you think may be coming your way next month or the month after. If you've been able to cut back on your spending and reduce your debt levels then perhaps it's time to do a little more pruning and reducing.

It may be that there are good times ahead but there are still many experts who are warning that the underlying problems that caused the financial crisis are still there. They suggest that we could be in for another collapse sooner rather than later that will be even worse than the one we're still experiencing now.

If it does happen and you've continued to be prudent with your spending then you'll be in much better shape to survive it than you will if you've blown your money and spent up big on your credit cards. Even if that collapse doesn't happen you'll be in much better financial shape if you haven't burnt through all your cash and credit.

A recent survey of businesses here in Australia ... a country that's survived the financial meltdown in much better shape than many others ... has found that most of us are not going to spend up big on anything in the next 12 months. Instead the businesses that were surveyed plan on making do with the plant and equipment that they've got so you won't be on your own if you decide to take a cautious approach to your future spending.

Two interesting tools
Over the weekend Steve finally got to use a very interesting little tool that he downloaded ages ago. As you may remember Steve uses Firefox as his browser of choice for just about all of his online work but this tool also works with IE so I'm going to be downloading it too.

The tool is called FireShot and it's a tool for grabbing screenshots. But this one doesn't just grab what's on your screen ... it grabs what's below the fold as well and it doesn't grab all your tool bars, address bars etc. It only grabs what's within the browser window and once it has it FireShot then lets you edit the image and/or export the image to a variety of destinations.

Think about some of those times when you really need to get the whole picture but haven't been able to with the tools that are available ... FireShot will get what the others miss. The basic tool is free but the paid version gives you plenty more options so it's definitely worth spending the money for the pro version.

The other tool that I saw Steve playing with over the weekend was something from Google. Have you ever wondered just who visits some of your competitors' sites and what their demographics are?

Well if you have a Google account ... and just about everyone has one of those ... you can now use Google's Ad Planner. You'll find it at google.com/adplanner and when you use the ‘search by site' option and enter the URL for the site you want information about you end up with everything from traffic stats to the income levels of the people who use the site.

Unfortunately the amount of information you get for a site depends on the amount of traffic that hits that site so for some sites you'll get lots of information while searches for smaller sites produce less or no information.

As with any tool like that that relies on information obtained over the Net there the accuracy won't be precise but it will give you some interesting data that you can work with. It will also give you some rather unusual ... okay, bizarre ... information. I just used the tool to look at about.com and according to the information the search produced most people who use about.com also visit a wide range of cooking and recipe sites.

Be sure to read the information that Google provides for people who use the tool but don't be put off by odd results like the cooking and recipe data for about.com. Use the to find data about some of the sites you promote and you could discover information that will either help you promote that site more effectively or perhaps even explain why you're not getting many sales there anymore.

I just did a search for one of the better known Milf sites and the drop in the traffic levels for that site over the last two years is incredible. It also shows that the biggest age group that accesses that site is 45 to 54 year olds and females make up over 25% of the people who visit the site.

A search for one of the leading link lists shows similar figures for age, traffic and gender.

And that's it for today folks ... there's no public holiday here in Australia so I'm off to the office to generate some wealth.